Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Hello, I am a Remote Seller

Hello, my name is Michael Ginsberg and I am owner of 3Gstore.com and I am a remote seller (i.e. I am a little guy, your mom/pop type business). After watching the senate hearings about the Marketplace Fairness Act,
I feel like “remote seller” is evil, crushes local businesses, kills
jobs and has caused all the financial problems that states currently
have.

Let me set the record straight.

My
business has grown over the years, BUT so has the number of jobs that I
have created. Some of those jobs are in different states. I pay
payroll taxes, income taxes, sales tax in Illinois, I offer health
insurance to my employees and our customers love us because we are the
most knowledgeable around on the products we sell, better than anyone
else (brick & mortar OR online) and take time to provide support
before and after the sale. Yes, we even have english speaking Americans
that provide tech support (fulltime employees all in the USA).

We
spend a few hours a month doing our sales tax for the Illinois
Department of Revenue for all the sales within the state of Illinois.
The Marketplace Fairness Act would require that we file tax returns
monthly to up to 9000 plus tax jurisdictions. The amount of hours that
would be required monthly to file would be staggering. It would be a
huge burden to become the tax collectors for every state and every tax
jurisdiction.

As
I listen to the discussion on C-SPAN, it scare me when I hear senators
talk about how the states will provide software to remote sellers to
help with charging and collecting taxes. Really? So, I am going to
have 50 different programs to run on my computer to help? This sounds
like a mess. There are probably 100s of different ecommerce platforms
that us remote sellers use, how are you going to create something that
is compatible with all of those different platforms? How many
hours/days/weeks of time will that take to implement?

My
business was audited by the Illinois Department of Revenue a few years
ago and the audit took 12 months and we wasted a lot of time. We gave
them 5 years of sales data and after 12 months of auditing, all they
found was that we didn’t pay use tax on some supplies we purchased. Can
you imagine if we are now open to being audited by all states and tax
jurisdictions?

The
Marketplace Fairness Act is NOT Fair. Amazon wants this because it
will put many of their smaller competitors out of business. When they
go out of business, many employees will be terminated and those job
losses will hurt our economy (less taxes paid, less payroll, less
disposable income to spend in each state).

Please
do not burden us and make us the tax collectors, we do not have the
resources to do this. The states will not win, as there will be less
disposable income being spent in the states. The winner will be
Amazon.com, as they will be able to use the government to eliminate
their smaller competitors. I don’t think this is the “level playing
field” that many seek.

Change
the definitions of smaller business, such as
less than 10 million in gross sales or those with less than 50 employees
should be exempt.